


Why Would You Do That

by Nalanzu



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 13:49:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10247717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nalanzu/pseuds/Nalanzu
Summary: Extremely short Season One case fic, in which Sam and Dean go off to investigate some suspicious deaths involving Very Fast Cars.





	

Black paint – he was surrounded by black paint, windows, a gray concrete floor. Gray walls jutted gracelessly upwards, the ridges of the corrugated sheet metal stark and unrelieved.   
  
_But there were windows – there was glass – wasn’t there?_  
  
The words floated through his mind, teasing, just barely inside the faded bubble of comprehension inside his head, except that he wasn’t inside his head; he could tell by the very flavor of the air he wasn’t breathing that everything he could see was a dream.  
  
Cars – lined up haphazardly, as though they were trying to crowd up the bare wooden staircase leading up to a miniscule second floor under the same high ceiling as the rest of the space, the lights overhead reflecting off the hoods and windshields, every vehicle black or white – vied for space with shelves full of metallic objects, tools and parts and boxes all strewn haphazardly about. Bumpers sat in a neat row against the back wall, and he noticed absently that half the cars were bare-assed or missing their engines. Two lifts to the left and in front of the stairs, painted bright blue, held shells barely recognizable as running vehicles, and a long metallic bench beyond them sparkled just as viciously as the paint. He tore his eyes away, searching for whatever it was that had caught his dreaming self.  
  
“No, please, stop!”  
  
The voice came from higher up, its owner visible in flashes as she moved past the rows of shelving crowding the half-wall that was the only concession to safety the second floor had. He tried to move closer, but there wasn’t room to maneuver through the maze of painted metal littering the ground floor. _Dream logic!_ he tried to tell himself, but he still couldn’t pick his way through without touching any of the vehicles, and they burned his bare skin.  
  
“Stop!” she sobbed again, and he could see that she was moving backwards, towards a door. Her gray button-down shirt was ripped, dark t-shirt underneath visible, and her faded jeans were bloodstained. He wriggled through the maze, finally, ducking under the lifts - _don’t fall on me, please,_ he muttered silently with a glance upwards – and finally reaching the stairs.   
  
An engine roared to life below him, deep throaty growl louder even than the Impala, and then another and another still. White smoke billowed through the room, the scent of exhaust choking him despite his certainty that he wasn’t actually breathing. A fourth engine started, and he suddenly realized they were all red-lining, impossibly loud, and the irrelevant thought that perhaps these weren’t cars after all but jet planes in disguise shot through his mind, shattered by even the engine on the lift below the car in which it belonged impossibly vibrating, air rushing through it despite the total lack of fuel.  
  
“Stop,” the girl gasped, and he could see her sink to the ground through the dense haze, blonde hair sliding around her face, fingers pressed against her nose and mouth. With a final ear-shattering roar, the fourteen cars below shut off simultaneously and the girl collapsed in total silence.  
  
“Sammy! Wake up! Sammy!”  
  
His brother’s voice grated in his ears, and Sam sucked in a lungful of blessedly clean air. The scent of exhaust clung to the inside of his nostrils as the sun beat down on his face. “Dean?”  
  
“If you wanted a nap, you should have said so,” Dean said, his shadow blotting out the sun as he crouched down. The tight set of his mouth belied the mocking statement, and Sam brought his hands up to rub at his eyes.  
  
“Where…” he started, letting Dean pull him to his feet, but the sight of gasoline pumps beyond the shiny black exterior of the Impala brought the memory back in a rush.  
  
“Bloody Mary really did a number on you, Sammy,” Dean said, letting go slowly.   
  
“It’s Sam,” he shot back automatically, and the twitch at the corner of Dean’s mouth told him he’d just allayed any fears his brother might have had. “I guess she did,” he added after a moment. He wasn’t about to admit that he’d dreamed of Jessica’s death before it had happened, much less that he’d just seen something else with the same feverish clarity. He rubbed his eyes again, trying to dispel the images, but they were burned into the backs of his eyelids. He couldn’t let it go without at least trying to find the place he’d dreamed of.  
  
“Ready to go?” Dean asked, keys in hand. The Impala’s tank was full, gas paid for under yet another fake name. Dean and his father had been an unending line of never-to-be-repaid credit, one of the many downsides to hunting as a full-time job.  
  
“Uh,” Sam said, looking around. A coffee shop stood a few hundred feet away, which probably meant free internet. “I’m actually a little shaky. Do you mind?”  
  
“I guess not,” Dean replied after a moment. From the way his eyes had gone all flat and shuttered, he knew Sam wasn’t being entirely honest, but he wasn’t about to push the issue either. “Coffee?” he said, and Sam knew Dean had figured out he’d gotten some kind of lead on what might be a case, but if Dean wasn’t going to ask, Sam wasn’t going to tell.  
  
“Coffee,” he agreed, and reached into the Impala for his laptop. Dean’s mouth compressed into a straight line, and Sam knew he’d just confirmed Dean’s suspicions, but he wasn’t going to volunteer information until he had actual solid facts.  
  
The girl’s shirt had had some sort of logo, and although he hadn’t seen it clearly, he was almost sure it had had both an S and a T. The most common consonants in the English language, to be sure, but the curvy line swinging around the single word had been both simple and visually distinctive. He’d been looking at logos for nearly twenty minutes, growing increasingly more frustrated, when it occurred to him that the cars themselves might be a clue.  
  
“What have you got?” Dean asked from across the table, coffee long gone. Pity there weren’t any hot waitresses to distract his brother; enough firm cleavage over a narrow waist and Dean wouldn’t have complained for at least another thirty minutes.  
  
“Just a hunch,” he muttered, trying to remember what _kind_ of cars they’d been. There had only been two types, in two colors, and if they hadn’t been trying to kill him he would have laughed. It had been so pretentious.   
  
“Uh huh,” Dean said, staring at him and worrying at a scratch down the outside of his wrist. Their previous case – a vengeful ghost in a mirror answering to the name of Bloody Mary – hadn’t been bloodless by a long shot, although most of the spilling had been done by others.   
  
“Stop picking at that,” Sam said absently, and Dean responded by tugging off the entire clot. “That’s disgusting,” he said, looking straight at Dean for the first time since entering the coffee shop. “Seriously.”  
  
Dean just smirked and dropped the bits into his empty coffee cup. “Be right back, Sammy.” A fresh line of red trickled across his pale skin, and Sam suddenly remembered the bright red R emblazoned across the larger of the two models of car in the garage. A bright red R had been underneath two black letters, font bold and angular.   
  
“G and T,” he muttered, and the logo sharpened in his mind’s eye. A garage wouldn’t sell cars, and none of them had looked damaged, but he had something to google now. A few minutes of weeding through links and Sam had a company in a city not far away that installed aftermarket tuning packages on two types of car. The logo matched the girl’s shirt perfectly.  
  
“Thornville?” Dean said from over his shoulder, a fresh cup of coffee in each hand. He handed one to Sam. “What’s in Thornville?”  
  
“Not much,” Sam said. “Possibly a case. Look at this.”  
  
The city put out a weekly newspaper, published two days before; it was so small it didn’t even merit its own website and was instead hosted on a larger network. It covered local news, though, and obituaries. Two employees of the same tiny aftermarket tuning company had died within the same week, both in vehicular accidents.  
  
“Yeah, so?” Dean said, clearly missing the connection.  
  
“Look, this guy here – drove his minivan straight into an overpass. Straight into it. And this one – killed in a snowmobiling accident.”  
  
“Yeah, so?” Dean said again, folding his arms. “That’s not a case, Sam. That’s a coincidence.”  
  
“Dean, there isn’t any snow!” Sam snatched the laptop back, pointing at the obituary in question.  
  
“Yeah, well, doesn’t mean something supernatural made the guy climb on a snowmobile. I’ve seen people do dumb shit.”  
  
“Yeah, but two people working for an auto shop dying in crashes within a week? That’s weird. Come on, we’ve put a case together out of less than this.” Sam folded up the laptop and shoved it in the bag. “Come on, it’s two and a half hours away. Three tops.”  
  
“Fine, but you sleep in the car. You faint in the middle of a case and it’s my ass on the line.”   
  
It was nice to see Dean wasn’t above playing the guilt card, Sam thought sourly, and then his choice of words registered. “I didn’t faint.”  
  
“You just keep telling yourself that, princess.”   
  
Dean’s smirk was still obnoxious, ninety miles later, but Sam had managed an hour of nightmare-free sleep in the front seat, and that counted as a victory in his book. “Are we there?”  
  
“Yes. Yes, we are. We are not only there, but we’ve driven around the entire town.” Dean had found what appeared to be a hotel, of marginally better quality than their usual motels.  
  
“Wait, how long –“   
  
“The entire town,” Dean continued, “consists of a grand total of two city blocks, most of which is a whole lot of historical nothing. Where’s this auto shop of yours?”  
  
“Uh,” Sam said, fumbling for the laptop.  
  
“Never mind. I’ll check us in.”   
  
Sam followed his brother inside, carrying the majority of the luggage. Salting the door and single window made him feel safer, although it wasn’t as if the dreams couldn’t cross salt lines. Dreams weren’t ghosts, after all. “So who are we today?” he asked, once Dean had carefully crossed the threshold.  
  
“What? Oh.” Dean mulled over the question for a moment. “Insurance,” he decided. “Clearing up a few matters.”  
  
“So we won’t be impersonating officers of the law. Or federal agents.” Sam couldn’t keep the disapproving edge out of his voice; there was trying to expedite matters by coming from a position of authority, and then there was the kind of thing that would get them on the FBI’s most wanted list. He’d rather not be quite that remarkable.  
  
“Here.” Dean thrust something at him; Sam recognized an ID card and a matching driver’s license and slid them both into his wallet. “Let’s go, then.”  
  
The auto shop, when they finally found it, was in half of a corrugated metal building on the outskirts of town, surrounded by earthy fields. Bits of plant matter in most of them told Sam that they’d grown corn most recently, not that it made any difference to the case. What would make a difference was the presence of flashing lights and sirens outside the two open bay doors, and thick black smoke billowing upwards.  
  
“Black smoke,” Sam muttered to himself. It wasn’t the dream. The dream had been full of white. “Not the dream. It’s not the dream. We’re not too late.” Except that someone else had died, just not the girl in the dream, which meant that they were too late after all.  
  
The parking lot of the small repair shop directly next to their possible – probable – case was still mostly empty, its employees gathered on the sidewalk outside. Dean pulled in and parked, garnering no attention whatsoever.  
  
“Hey, what’s going on over there?” Sam asked, drifting towards one of the men on the walk, trying for casual and curious.  
  
“Car went off the dyno,” the man said. “Right through the bay door.”  
  
Looking more closely, Sam could see that the farther away of the two huge doors was bent at an odd angle, as if something huge and heavy had come flying out of it at a high speed. That was probably exactly what had happened, although he had no idea what a dyno was. A large white trailer directly opposite the door had been knocked over, plowing a dark furrow into the gold-dead grass around the gravel parking lot, and the remains of what had probably been a very expensive bright red car had been leveraged out of the remains of the trailer and cut open.  
  
“Still don’t think it’s a case, Dean?” he asked softly, edging back towards the Impala.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, you win.”  
  
“Was someone in the car?” Sam heard from the general direction of the sidewalk. A general murmur answered him, although he couldn’t tell whether it was affirmative or negative. The absence of an ambulance and the fact that the car had been pried apart confirmed that whatever it was had claimed a third victim.  
  
“We’re not getting anything else here today,” Dean said. “Do some research. Hit the newspapers and check online. What might have targeted this company and why?”  
  
“Three hours in the driver’s seat says it’s a ghost.” Sam buckled his seatbelt.  
  
“And what do I get if I win? Driving hours aren’t gambling currency, Sammy.” Dean pulled out onto the two-lane highway, heading back into town.   
  
“ _Sam._ ” Somehow he knew he was going to be the one spending all the time at the library.  
  
Several hours later, Sam wished his prediction had been wrong, but he was still in the library with his laptop and no further to finding anything odd about TIP; it was a new business, less than two years old, family-owned and mostly family-run, with a few outside people as employees. He had managed, with a few well-placed phone calls, managed to learn that the previous fatalities had been un-related employees but that the poor guy in the car when it careened off the dyno had been the owner’s younger brother. That revelation brought a stab of almost physical pain; he’d been back on the road with Dean for a matter of weeks and yet the thought of his brother being permanently taken away made him feel as if the air had gone out of the room.  
  
“Sammy.” Dean materialized behind him and Sam nearly tried to climb the wall.  
  
“Dean,” he managed, once his heart dropped out of his throat and back into his chest where it belonged. “Don’t do that.”  
  
“Aren’t we out of practice,” Dean said, reaching over to ruffle his hair. Sam ducked away irritably. “Any luck?”  
  
“Nothing. Nada. Zip.” Sam dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, feeling the beginnings of a perfectly normal headache coming on. The dreams sometimes triggered almost-migraines – or was it the headaches that triggered the dreams? – but this was just sleep deprivation and tight shoulders. “It’s perfectly normal. There’s nothing weird about any of these people.”  
  
“Maybe they all have a dirty secret.” Dean peered over his shoulder, but the laptop was powering down, and he straightened in disgust.  
  
“Well, if they do, it’s connected to the company, because none of them have anything else in common.” Sam stretched, nearly smacking his brother in the face. “We’re going to have to talk to the owner.”  
  
“Great. Let’s go.” Dean got nearly to the door – not that it was that far away – before he noticed that Sam wasn’t following. “What?”  
  
“The guy just lost his brother, Dean.” Sam grabbed his laptop and what information he’d been able to glean and jogged toward the exit. “That was who was in the car this afternoon.”  
  
“So we’ll go tomorrow. Come on.”  
  
As it turned out, Dean was bored; he hadn’t found out much of anything either. Snowmobile hadn’t spent much time around the town, and while Minivan had been pretty much a regular fixture in several of the local shops, there wasn’t much of anything useful that Dean had learned.  
  
“Something’s targeting the company. It’s gotta be a ghost.” Sam had repeated the same sentence at least six times in the past hour alone, sitting at the closest thing the town had to a bar. _Damn town_ , he muttered internally.   
  
“Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but who was it?” The building was new; no remains had been disturbed during its construction and nothing had been dug up around it recently enough to explain the sudden appearance of a vengeful spirit.  
  
Sam shook his head. There was nothing and no one around the building who’d died, ever, who had a connection to TIP. “Zero candidates, unless you count the three victims this week.”  
  
“They don’t count,” Dean said promptly.   
  
“No, wait.” Sam pulled the laptop closer, turning it away to minimize glare. He’d idly googled the company name in conjunction with the words ‘car crash’ to see what would come up. A number of racing accidents had shown up – weekend enthusiasts failing to take proper safety precautions – but nothing fatal at first. “Look at this.”  
  
Dean grabbed for the computer, nearly dumping it on the floor, and Sam clamped down on his reflexive instinct to cling to it before Dean broke it irreparably. “Hair stylist dies in car crash?” Dean asked dubiously. “That was weeks ago.”  
  
“See what he was driving?” Sam reached around the screen and scrolled downwards.   
  
“Hey, TIP built that car.” Dean tapped at the keyboard, apparently coming up blank, and shoved the laptop back towards Sam. “You think this Brian Harper might be connected?”  
  
“Couldn’t hurt to check him out.” Sam shrugged. “We could at least salt and burn the body, even if we’re not sure.”  
  
“Columbus in the morning, then.”  
  
Harper’s wife was less than forthcoming about her husband’s obsession with a car he hadn’t really driven that often; considering that Dean was claiming to be from an automotive magazine doing a story on the car now that it had met its end, Sam was surprised she spoke as much as she did.  
  
“I hated that thing,” she said, so quietly Sam almost couldn’t hear, as he was stepping outside. Dean was already unlocking the Impala’s front door, giving him an impatient look.   
  
“Hated it?” Sam said, trying to project sympathy.  
  
“He wouldn’t have driven it if Ron hadn’t insisted,” she whispered. “That car killed my husband.”  
  
“Killed?” Sam’s first thought was that the car itself had been possessed somehow, and now he was going to have to track down another death.  
  
“There was no reason for it. No reason for it to accelerate that fast. No reason for that big of an engine. It was too dangerous and he knew it.” She wiped at her eyes.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, and she nodded before she closed the door behind him.  
  
“She thinks the car killed Harper,” Sam said by way of explanation.  
  
“Killed like haunted?” Dean asked, putting the car into gear and heading towards the highway. “Did something else happen to that car?”  
  
“No, no, just that there was too much under the hood. Wasn’t drivable.” Sam chewed on his thumbnail. “She blames Ron Tobias for her husband’s death.”  
  
“You think she’s doing something? Witchcraft, maybe?”   
  
“I didn’t see any paraphernalia. Did you?”  
  
“We didn’t look, did we.” Dean tapped his fingers restlessly on the steering wheel. “Besides, the guy died over a month ago. Why start haunting the shop now?”  
  
“She didn’t seem the type,” Sam hedged. He couldn’t say why he didn’t think Rita Harper was responsible, just that it felt wrong.  
  
“They never seem the type, Sam. Come on, you know witches don’t have warts. Well, not usually.”   
  
“Let’s just salt and burn the body. If he shows up there, we’ll know it was Harper.” Sam squinted down at the old, wrinkled map he’d unearthed from the glove compartment. “You know, they have these little things called GPS navigation systems now.”  
  
“I have a GPS navigation system,” Dean retorted.  
  
“Wait, you do?” Sam would have sworn that Dean would never have changed the classic lines of the car, interior or exterior. “Where?”  
  
“Sittin’ in the front seat, Sammy.” Dean’s grin was almost wide enough to split his face in half. “Come on, navigate!”  
  
“Hardy har har,” Sam muttered, and turned the map sideways. “Take the next left.”  
  
Nothing out of the ordinary cropped up in the cemetery, and the relatively fresh grave was easy to find. Sam made a face at the sparse grass in front of the headstone.   
  
“What?” Dean asked.  
  
“Still ripe,” Sam said. “He’s only been dead for a month. This is kind of going to suck.” He sighed. “You want to wait until dark?” No one else was visible at that moment, but digging up a recent grave in the middle of a major city in broad daylight wasn’t a particularly good way to keep off the local law enforcement’s radar.  
  
Dean glanced around. “Yeah, and while we’re at it, let’s see if we can figure out whether the good Ms. Harper isn’t practicing a few black arts.”  
  
By the time the sun had nearly set, Sam had decided he was never speaking to his brother again, or at least not until they were far away from the case. Dean had nearly gotten the cops called on them, sneaking back out of the second floor of the house when Ms. Harper had come back home; they were both lucky he hadn’t been recognized. He hadn’t found any signs of witchcraft either; nothing that would channel the kind of energy necessary to cause deaths over thirty miles away.  
  
“You’re opening the coffin,” Sam said instead, changing his mind.   
  
“You’re digging first, then,” Dean said, and tossed him the shovel. Sam tossed it right back.  
  
“I’m heading back to the auto shop, in case anything weird happens.”  
  
“It already would have,” Dean pointed out. “Daylight, not a problem for ghosts. Besides, it didn’t pull most of its shit at the shop.”  
  
“I just…” Sam shook his head. “Bad feeling.”  
  
“Are we going on your gut, now?” Dean threw the shovel towards him again, pulling his keys out of his pocket.   
  
“You were the one – what are you doing with those?”   
  
Dean slid the keys back into his jacket, picking up the second shovel. “Changed my mind. The faster we dig, the sooner it’ll be over.”  
  
“Fine.” Sam jammed the shovel into the ground, but he couldn’t help feeling that they were in exactly the wrong place. He hadn’t been wrong about the smell, either, and nothing out of the ordinary showed up as they poured salt on the less than pleasant corpse and set it on fire.  
  
“Okay, that’s enough, let’s go.” There was enough gasoline in the opened pit to keep the body burning for hours, but there was nothing odd about the fire, either. The EMF meter was silent, and Sam was really beginning to think that they should be back in Thornville, by the shop.   
  
“Impatient, Sammy?”  
  
Ignoring the nickname, Sam waved the meter around. “There’s nothing here, look.”  
  
“All right, all right, don’t get your panties in a twist.” Dean scraped most of the dirt back into the hole, the flames going out with a low hiss. Sam kicked in the rest of it, until the ground looked only vaguely disturbed, wishing he didn’t feel as if this was wasted time.  
  
“Come on.” Sam all but leaned through the windshield the entire drive back, clutching the EMF meter as though it could give him information.  
  
“What the hell is wrong with you, Sam?” Dean started to reach over, finger extended, but a muffled boom ahead of them caught his attention.  
  
The shop was only a few minutes away, but Sam could see the glow through the trees. Something had caught fire – was burning fiercely. Whatever it was, it had exploded. The Impala skidded to a halt next door, throwing gravel against the undercarriage. Sam leapt out of the car before the wheels stopped moving, racing forward. The EMF meter screamed in his hands, and a figure swirled through the smoke rising from what had been a perfectly serviceable gray car. The face was clear for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Sam to recognize Brian Harper. _But we salted and burned your body!_ he raged at it, and he could have sworn the spirit laughed before dissipating.  
  
“Dean, it’s him!” He couldn’t see anything inside the burning vehicle, sitting almost innocently at the edge of the drive as though it was only waiting for traffic to clear so it could pull out. The closer of the bay doors started to roll shut, and he could see a girl – no older than he was – standing halfway down a set of stark wooden stairs. It matched his dream perfectly, and he was running for the closing door before he could make a conscious decision. “It’s Harper!” he shouted over his shoulder as the farther door began sliding downwards.  
  
“What?” Dean called back, already at the burning car with a fire extinguisher.  
  
“It’s Harper!” Sam shouted again, and threw himself under the door. He hit something metallic as soon as he cleared the edge, the impact almost but not quite dislocating his shoulder. He used the car to pull himself to his feet, resisting the urge to kick the bumper on the way up.  
  
“Sammy!” Dean shouted from outside and pounded on the corrugated metal. That was one point of difference from his dream, and somehow that made him feel marginally better.   
  
“Find out what he’s linked to! It’s gotta be around here somewhere!” Sam called back, and started threading his way through the tightly parked cars inside the garage toward the girl on the stairs.  
  
“Who are you?” she asked, voice wavering. “What did you mean, linked? What’s going on? Oh god, is Barry… is he dead?”  
  
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Sam said, putting on his best I-am-not-a-crazy-person face. “We just have to get out of here.”  
  
“Who _are_ you?” she asked again, backing upwards. Sam was nearly at the bottom of the stairs now, the cars behind him parked as though they were converging on the second floor. The effect was just as eerie as it had been in his dream; more so, now that he could actually touch them.  
  
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he repeated, and set his foot on the first step.  
  
The sound of a door he hadn’t noticed slamming shut nearly made him jump out of his skin, and by the time he looked back up, the girl was gone. “Get away! I’m calling the cops!”  
  
“No, they’re already… wait,” he said, and stopped climbing. “I’m Sam. What’s your name?”  
  
Unbelievably, she actually poked her head around the shelving obscuring most of the open corridor at the top of the stairs. “Lily,” she answered. “Lily Tobias. This is my dad’s shop.”  
  
“Yeah?” Sam said, not really paying attention to her words. She was wearing the same gray shirt she’d had on in his dream. “He here?”  
  
“Uh, no,” she said, and then her eyes widened; she’d just realized she’d admitted to a possibly crazy person that she was alone in the building and one of her coworkers – maybe even a friend – had just gone up in smoke outside.  
  
“Okay. Okay, Lily.” Without knowing why he chose the next question, he simply let it slip out. “How old are you?”  
  
“What?” She stared at him. “Why do you want to know?”  
  
“Just curious, I guess. You twenty-two?” Something about her felt familiar, but he couldn’t tell what. He and Dean had never been to this tiny town before.   
  
“Uh, yeah.” She actually started to smile a little bit, almost shyly, and it felt as if something inside shifted into place as the fact that she was his age was confirmed.  
  
“Good. That’s good.” He glanced over his shoulder; every door was closed tightly – both bay doors and both actual doors with handles leading out the front, and the emergency exit below the stairs in back. “Is there another way out of here?”  
  
“There are five doors,” Lily said. “They just closed! I didn’t do that!”  
  
“I know. I know.” He wanted her out of there before what he’d dreamed really did come true; he didn’t think he could take it if he started dreaming of deaths before they occurred. “Come on.”  
  
She was just about to step forward, but the sound of an engine roaring to life on the floor below made her stop in her tracks. He could see the sudden stiffening of her muscles as she slowly turned to look at the first floor. “What?”  
  
“Dammit,” Sam cursed. He bounded up the stairs and grabbed the girl by the wrist. She pulled away, but he was a foot taller and nearly twice as heavy; she wasn’t going to escape without breaking something. She beat at him, and he nearly lost his balance as he dragged her down the stairs. Four more engines had started, white exhaust pouring out. Lily was struggling more feebly now, and Sam pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose. The closest door was right behind the stairs, but it wouldn’t open, and now he could hear eleven of the engines running. Smog burned in his throat and he pushed feebly at the door. Lily shoved right along with him, her own shirt covering her face, but it didn’t do any good.  
  
A high-pitched shriek sounded above him, and Brian Harper’s spirit coalesced out of the fog. Sam threw himself at the closed door, but it wouldn’t open and then it was suddenly below him. It took him a moment to realize he’d bounced off it and hit the floor. He pushed himself upwards and tried again, to no avail. “Dean!”  
  
“Sammy!”   
  
He could hear Dean shouting from outside. “Dean,” he tried to call back, but his voice wouldn’t leave his throat.  
  
“No!”   
  
The scream could have come from anywhere, but it was the ghost keening as it flared bright blue-white and dissolved, every door in the building blowing open and every engine falling silent. The smog drifted outwards as Dean dashed inside, calling his name. “Sam! Sammy!”  
  
The air coming in gave him enough of a jolt to answer. “Over here, Dean.” The girl was behind him; he’d narrowly missed her when he’d fallen, and Dean dragged them both outside.  
  
“The paramedics are on the way,” his brother said, and Sam took it as their cue to leave.  
  
“Just let me catch my breath,” he said, and Dean glared at him.  
  
“The paramedics are going to check you out, Sam,” he said. “Breathing in exhaust fumes isn’t exactly the kind of thing I know how to fix.”  
  
The splitting headache Sam had developed forty minutes later turned out to prove Dean right, but the local police had believed that the two of them had just been driving past and seen the fire. Lily’s statement that she’d seen their car screech into the parking lot across the yard had been incredibly helpful in that regard, as had her account of Sam trying to save her life and Dean getting her out of the building. Sam didn’t hear any of it until the following morning; the paramedics had taken both of them to the nearest hospital and the doctors there had insisted he stay the night for observation and treatment with oxygen and possibly other unspecified things.   
  
Dean checked him out AMA as soon as visiting hours started the following morning, the Impala already packed with their belongings. The possibility of delayed neurological damage didn’t bother Sam much; nothing really felt wrong, not that that was a reliable gauge of whether or not he’d suffered brain damage. He’d been scanned, though, before Dean got there and nothing had shown up. His blood had been checked, too, and there was very little trace of carbon monoxide remaining. Other than a dull headache, he felt fine.  
  
“Well?” Sam asked, as they pulled onto the interstate.   
  
“Well, what?”  
  
“What was the ghost tied to?” Sam asked impatiently.  
  
“The car,” Dean said, and Sam glanced over at him. His brother was dragging out the explanation on purpose; he could tell.  
  
“Spill, Dean. Inquiring minds want to know.” The headache chose that moment to flare slightly before subsiding almost entirely, but he still couldn’t help wincing a little.  
  
“You okay?” Dean asked instead.  
  
“Spill,” Sam repeated.  
  
“So this Harper guy – the shop owner talks him into driving the car, he crashes, insurance ties it up, the owner – Ron – gets the car back. That was the trigger. Ron moving the car to the shop.” Dean rolled the window down. “Harper’s blood was all over it. I saw it behind the building, torched it, end of story.”  
  
“Huh.” Sam wriggled around in the seat, trying to get comfortable. Maybe now that he’d stopped the dream from coming true, he’d be able to catch a little sleep. “Kind of a waste, really.”  
  
“What is?”  
  
“Come on, Dean. That entire shop – the whole industry is an exercise in why would you do that.” Sam didn’t bring up the fact that there was nowhere in the United States that a car could legally be driven faster than seventy, anyway, since Dean made a habit of ignoring posted speed limits as often as possible.  
  
“To make the car go faster, Sammy.” Dean grinned.   
  
“Yeah, yeah.”   
  
“Can’t hear you over the music.”   
  
“What music?” Sam asked, but Dean was already sliding Metallica into the cassette player, and for once the sound was soothing.  
  
FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> So this was written many years ago and is being uploaded here specifically for the benefit of a specific individual. I had a lot of fun writing it (v. therapeutic for various reasons).


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